Working closely with would-be opponents of nuclear waste repositories is important to getting such sites built, a panel of international nuclear experts said at a conference last week.
“I think it’s very important to have informed critics [of nuclear waste],” Arne Kaijser, professor of technology and history at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, said during the Sep. 3 discussion hosted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM).
The panel was part of a three-day meeting organized by NASEM as part of a study assessing the feasibility of advanced nuclear technologies. The study is running concurrently with the National Academies’ Congressionally-mandated research on the back end of advanced nuclear technologies, including radioactive waste.
Kaijser said Sep. 3 that anti-nuclear groups can effectively become “counter-experts” on issues like nuclear waste repositories. “I think that fostering counter expertise is really important … particularly in an early stage so that engineers developing something become aware at an early stage that there may be serious problems,” he said.
A government, industry or any entity seeking to build a waste repository shouldn’t rely on the public’s “blind trust,” said Anne Bergmans, lecturer and senior research fellow at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.
“We want to be able to show you that we know what we’re doing and that we mean well, and we want to show you our plans,” Bergmans said, “and then you can turn them around and see if you agree and say that we trust you.”
“You want to prove that you’re trustworthy,” Bergmans said.
In the U.S., community buy-in, or lack thereof, has crippled the government’s previous attempts to build and operate a nuclear waste repository. The moribund Yucca Mountain site in Nye County, Nev. was effectively scuttled in the early 2010s after successful pressure on the Obama administration from Nevada politicians including Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
Community consent has been a central pillar of the Joe Biden administration’s plan to find a site for a federal interim storage facility for the nation’s spent nuclear fuel inventory. Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm has said that an interim storage inquiry would employ a ‘consent-based’ strategy, a notion popularized by the 2012 Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.
Congress’s 2022 budget, which has yet to be approved by both chambers, would allot roughly $20 million for DOE’s interim storage inquiry.
